Toshiba Blade X-gale Macbook Air SSD now available to all manufacturers

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One of the key components in allowing Apple to keep the new MacBook Air so thin is a new SSD from Toshiba. It’s called the Blade X-gale and does away with the casing you would normally find on an SSD drive. Instead it looks like a couple of sticks of RAM.

While the Air got the X-gale first, Toshiba has no intention of limiting its use to just super-thin Apple hardware. 64GB, 128GB, and 256GB versions of the drive are now being made available to any manufacturer that wants to use them, paving the way for a slew of thinner laptops and netbooks.

The Blade X-gale has modules that measure just 24 x 2.2 x 108.9mm for the 64GB and 128GB options. The 256GB module doubles up taking the height to 3.7mm. The weight is 9.8 grams or 13.2 grams for the largest size. Speed is not going to be an issue with sequential read and write speeds of 220MB/s and 180MB/s respectively.

One area that remains a mystery is pricing for the SSD. While a lack of casing should actually drop the price we assume the size aspect with command a healthy premium.

It’s all down to the price whether any laptop or netbook manufacturer will decide to use the Blade X-gale. If the premium isn’t too high then it should get picked up by a few companies such as HP and Dell for their more expensive models. If we see it used in a netbook I’ll be very surprised.

The small size may allow for super thin machines, but there’s also the advantage of leaving more room in a laptop for a bigger battery while at the same time cutting power use compared to a standard hard drive. Both of those factors could add a couple of hours to battery life, something which is becoming ever more important as a marketing tool when selling portable machines.